I’ve had a ever changing collection of vintage computers for quite some time, one of these is a Wang APC (Advanced Professional Computer) - I’d acquired it with a bulk lot of computers bought of Trade Me. After testing a few of the computers I got to the Wang, unfortunately it wouldn’t show any signs of life apart from the AC fan in the power supply.

A few things I tried: Re-seat RAM and connectors, clean any dirt/dust fromt he boards. Re-cap the PSU (only the low voltage caps as I had the correct values for those already)

This didn’t help so the Wang went back on the shelf to be dealt with later.

About 2 years later I saw a post on the local Vintage Computer Facebook page, someone was offering a semi-working wang, with a monitor, I jumped on the opportunity and bought it. The issue with the new Wang was it wouldn’t boot, but it did show error codes on the keybaord and in made some beeps! Life!

After I had done some debugging by swapping the boards/ram and PSU around between this new machine and my broken one, I was able to have a complete working Wang, I used the RAM and high voltage PSU board from my original Wang with the rest of the new Wang.

TBC